Hi, I'm David. Greek mythology and Travian-style strategy were a huge part of my teen years - the slow-burn, weeks-long campaigns where you logged in twice a day to nudge a build queue and check on your alliance. I never got over the modern versions of those games feeling pay-walled and reset-happy: most of them now ask for monthly fees, gate the good units behind premium accounts, or wipe everyone's progress every season so the company can sell the next one.
Hellas Online is my answer to that. A persistent Greek-themed strategy MMO built the way I'd want to play one - your kingdom, your decisions, your timeline.
Hellas Online is a browser-based persistent strategy MMO set in a stylised ancient-Greek world. It sits in the lineage of the slow-burn browser strategy games of the 2000s - Travian, Ikariam, OGame - stripped of the monetisation that bolted itself onto those games over the years and rebuilt with the systems that genre needed but never got.
The core loop. Found a town. Build out its economy (sawmill, marble quarry, crystal mine, sulfur pit, vineyard, gold from the marketplace). Train an army from a roster of 20+ ground units and a separate naval branch. Research technology to unlock stronger units, faster construction, better trade routes, sharper spies. Send armies across a real-time world map - travel takes hours, not seconds, so every attack is a commitment you make in advance. Battles resolve into detailed reports you can pick apart afterwards.
Beyond the city. Settle additional islands as you grow. Found or join a kingdom and vote on its policies, treasury, and diplomacy. Run kingdom-wide research that benefits every member. Open trade routes, dig for relics that grant lasting bonuses, and stake territory on the world map. There's a forum at forum.hellasonline.xyz for diplomacy that doesn't fit in chat - alliance recruitment, peace treaties, war declarations, post-mortems.
How it plays day to day. Login twice or three times a day to set build queues, glance at incoming battles, and message allies. Take a week off and your kingdom is exactly where you left it - or set vacation mode and have it actively protected. There is no daily-login chore, no time-gated grind, no FOMO event that disappears tomorrow.
Where it runs. Entirely in your browser. No download, no app store, no client patcher. One account, one save, playable from a laptop, a phone, or a Chromebook in a library. The UI scales between desktop and mobile so you can check on a battle from your phone and plan your week's research from your desk.
These aren't slogans on a marketing page - they're constraints the game is built under. Every feature ships with a check against this list; anything that would break one gets cut, redesigned, or held back. If you ever see Hellas Online break one of these, something has gone wrong and I want to hear about it.
"Built openly" doesn't mean the source is public - it isn't, yet. It means the project doesn't hide what it's doing or how it's running. Three concrete things back that up:
1. The stack is honest about itself. Hellas Online is written end-to-end in TypeScript: React on the client, Fastify and Prisma on the server, Postgres for persistent state, Redis and BullMQ for the long-running tick work (resource production, build queues, movement arrival, battle resolution), Socket.io for real-time chat and notifications. The whole thing runs on a single VPS in Helsinki, Finland - no AWS, no GCP, no third-party "platform" tier. When the server has a bad day, you can read about it in plain language; there's no opaque cloud provider to blame.
2. Every change is logged before you notice it.The changelog feed in the lobby gets a new entry every time anything ships to production - bug fixes, balance tweaks, new features, security work, even minor visual polish. Each entry is dated, version-tagged, and written in plain English (not "various improvements"). If a patch changes how your kingdom plays, you'll see it in the changelog before you notice it in the game.
3. Real incidents get real explanations. When something breaks - a worker fails, a migration goes wrong, a balance change has unintended consequences - the fix lands with a note explaining what happened and what was changed. Players affected by a bug get the resources or progress restored where possible. There is no "we're aware of an issue" stonewall.
The repository itself is private for now - mostly because operating an MMO with a fully public codebase invites cheat development that a solo dev can't keep up with. As the project matures and the anti-cheat surface hardens, I plan to publish architecture writeups, design post-mortems, and eventually open-source the non-sensitive parts (UI components, the canonical battle simulator, etc.). The goal is for the project to be openly built even when the full source isn't openly licensed.
Three real channels right now - I'd rather have a few I actually read than a wall of links I ignore.
No Discord, no Reddit, no Twitter at the moment. If those become useful later they'll be added here.